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20 Jan 2005 15:08:02
A change of career is always daunting, but one University of Luton lecturer simply looked on it as a new challenge.
Patricia Roberts, a lecturer in cognitive psychology, teaches on many of the University’s Psychology undergraduate and Masters programmes.
“Cognitive psychology is concerned with mental processes and their effects on human behaviour,” explained Pat. “It focuses on sensation, perception, motor control, attention, memory, learning, language, reasoning, problem solving and decision making.”
Pat started at the University in 1992 as an undergraduate student on a BA (Hons) in Psychology and Health. “I was a dance teacher until 1985 and owned a dance school,” said Pat.
“I’ve always had a natural affinity with teaching and decided to make the move into academia. Psychology always interested me and I completed a few modules in the subject through The Open University, before starting at Luton.”
Once she completed her degree in 1995, Pat moved on to her next challenge – a PhD (Philosophiae Doctor) also based within the Division of Psychology.
“I saw the PhD advertised towards the end of my final year and decided to go for it. It was a subject-specific PhD and this meant that I had the freedom to use my own ideas within a set area of interest.”
Pat’s PhD, entitled ‘An Investigation into the Structure of Numerical Cognition’, looked at two main areas. The first considered other theories of how the human brain processes numbers and the second area took aspects from the first study to look at in more detail.
She explained: “The first part of the study looked at adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying and whether we calculate numbers in the same way that we calculate, for example, size of objects.
“I considered ‘visual spatial’ processing – conjuring up an image of the problem in your head and then calculating the answer – and whether there were any similarities between numerical and other types of cognitive processing.”
In the latter part of the study, Pat conducted three experiments focusing on visual spatial processing, magnitude judgement of numbers and objects and subitizing. “Magnitude judgement simply means that when you look at two objects, is it easy to differentiate which is the bigger of the two.
“Put this into the context of numbers and take, for example, three and nine, it’s obvious nine is bigger at a glance. However, if you have three and four, it takes your brain longer, albeit milliseconds to decide which is greater.”
Pat added: “Subitizing looks at how your brain counts what you’re seeing. If there were three peas dropped onto the table you would straight away say there were three peas. If there were seven however, you would have to think for a little longer.”
Pat considered various other theories from the 1980s and early 1990s, and balanced her evaluation and findings against past hypotheses.
She concluded that: “When calculating multi-digit numbers you do indeed picture those numbers in your mind and use this method to work out the answer.
“Magnitude judgement is necessary to be able to process the information, and subitizing, taking time to work out how many objects are in front of you, rather than knowing instantly, is in an intentional process.”
Pat now hopes to publish certain aspects of her thesis and is currently involved in a number of other research activities within the Division of Psychology.
Latest news» 2005» Jan» How Pat danced her way from one career to the next
